Marking the 80th anniversary of the atom bomb, academic Frank Close takes us into the story of the pursuit of nuclear power, and looks at how an innocent and collaborative process was overwhelmed by the politics of the 1930s.
In his book Destroyer of Worlds, Close spans decades and continents to tell the full history of nuclear power and the extraordinary minds behind it, reassessing the roles of three remarkable women as well as looking at how the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki opened the way to a still more terrible possibility: a thermonuclear bomb, the so-called ‘backyard weapon’, that could destroy all life on earth – from anywhere.
Close is a Fellow of the Royal Society, Professor Emeritus of Theoretical Physics at Oxford University and Fellow Emeritus in Physics at Exeter College, Oxford.
